This invention relates to dental devices and in particular to such devices utilized in the extraction of tooth roots.
Dentists are often required to remove a tooth root of a patient after the root has become diseased or damaged, especially when a tooth has been broken off due to injury or during attempted extraction. Once the tooth crown breaks off so that only the root below the gum line remains, it is very difficult to remove the remaining root with standard dental extraction forceps. When a tooth breaks leaving only the root, the standard procedure used by dentists involves cutting the surrounding gum tissue, cutting and removing part of the bone around the tooth root, and subsequently prying the tooth root out of the patient's jaw. This standard procedure is painful, produces substantial trauma in the mouth region surrounding the root, is very time consuming and the resulting damaged tissue is slow in healing. This standard procedure does not provide for a controlled, stable extraction due to the amount of hand prying involved.
There are specially designed root extraction instruments in the prior art. However, such instruments are often cumbersome and difficult to operate, since such instruments are typically wholly placed within the mouth of a patient such that manipulation must take place entirely within the mouth and the mouth of the patient must be opened at painful angles to accommodate the instruments. Certain of these devices employ the use of a tooth root screw which is threadably inserted in the tooth root. Some of the prior art devices utilize sliding tubes, one of which tubes is connected to a tooth root screw and the other is supported by the teeth of the patient; however, pulling on handles connected to the tubes requires work inside the mouth and the device tends to be hard to stabilize. Other devices urge the tooth root from the jaw by means of a tooth root screw which has oppositely threaded root and shank portions and which is adapted to have the root portion screwed into a root canal of a root to be removed. A nut is screwed onto the shank portion, engages a base plate supported by the teeth, and is turned by hand or with a wrench until the tooth root is freed from the jaw. These latter devices have apparently not been heavily utilized by the dental community because of the awkwardness of using these devices, since manual manipulation of the moving parts thereof is required almost entirely within the limited confines of the mouth. Use of prior art devices is especially difficult when extracting rearward tooth roots due to the reduced vertical space available in the rear of the mouth even when wide open. The later discussed devices also require substantial mechanical adjustment in the tooth root screw engaging process and do not use force-absorbing dental saddles which easily adjust to accommodate varied tooth and gum regions to allow a stable extraction of the tooth root which does no damage to surrounding teeth and gums.
Thus, there exists a need for a dental device which provides for the extraction of tooth roots with minimal amounts of trauma to the surrounding tissue and requires minimal healing time, maintains a relatively low profile within the mouth, provides for quick and easy engagement of a root screw imbedded in a root by a remainder of the dental device, can be manipulated and operated externally of the mouth, and which takes advantage of leverage and purchase principles to ease extraction.